An NCAA survey of its student-athletes released Tuesday indicates that men's golfers are much more frequent gamblers than any other NCAA athletes. / Kevin Liles, USA TODAY Sports

by Dan Wolken, USA TODAY Sports

by Dan Wolken, USA TODAY Sports

Since the creation of a task force nine years ago to address gambling issues among college athletes, the NCAA has made some progress in curbing potentially dangerous behavior, according to data from its quadrennial survey on gambling behaviors and attitudes.

But several trends revealed in the survey, released Tuesday, are troubling for the NCAA's enforcement division, with one sport in particular emerging as a major concern: golf.

According to the NCAA's data, 21.3% of male college golfers in Division I admitted to gambling on sports at least once a month, a rate more than double any other sport. That number is up from 14.4% in the 2004 survey and stands in contrast to other sports where the numbers have either decreased or remained stagnant. By comparison, 5.9% of Division I men's basketball players and 4.6% of football players admitted to gambling on sports at least once per month.

NCAA rules prohibit all forms of sports betting for players and coaches, with eligibility penalties for anyone caught violating them.

"It's certainly an issue because the numbers are just so high across the board (for golf) in any gambling activity, not just sports wagering," said Mark Strothkamp, the NCAA's associate director of enforcement on sports gambling issues. "It's the culture within that sport. In any country club in America, you can go see that type of activity going on. That's the norm within that sport, and we need to combat that norm."

But it's a major challenge for the NCAA, especially given the increasingly friendly environment for gamblers both in youth culture and on the Internet. One-third of men and 17.8% of women said their first gambling experience occurred prior to high school, both up significantly from the 2008 survey.

"It's difficult to make inroads sometimes when you have entrenched behaviors," said Tom Paskus, the NCAA's principal research scientist who analyzed approximately 23,000 responses to the survey across all sports and divisions.

Percentage of male student-athletes that wagered on sports at least once a month

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Those behaviors seem are particularly entrenched in golf, where casual betting on the course is an accepted and often encouraged part of the culture. Realistically, that's a difficult mindset for college coaches to combat: 56% of men's golfers admitted to gambling on "games of personal skill," which would include on-course wagering, within the previous year.

"Go into any country club, that stuff is going on," University of Memphis coach Grant Robbins said. "Guys going go out there in the summer and playing for five bucks a hole or something like that, that's tough to police. I'm sure that goes on. When we're in control of them, we try to make sure nothing happens on our watch, and it's communicated to them constantly. They're hammered with it by our compliance department."

What the survey reveals, however, is that college golfers are far more likely than other athletes to engage in all forms of gambling, including the lottery and casinos (which aren't against NCAA rules). The troubling number is that 44% of men's golfers said they had bet on sports within the past year as opposed to 24.9% of male athletes in all the other sports. Moreover, 13% of golfers admitted knowing a bookie, compared to 5% for all other male athletes and 1% for female athletes. Seven percent of men's golfers in Division I had gambled on their own team.

"I don't know why (the culture) leads golfers into other types of gambling," North Carolina coach Andrew Sapp said. "I even have a rule that whenever we go to a tournament where there's a casino, you can't go in for that very purpose. It's legal, but the image of going into a casino isn't necessarily the image of what we want to portray for our student-athletes."

The why aspect is "a question that needs to be asked," Paskus said, as the NCAA builds a strategy for increasing its educational efforts in the college golf community. Though some would point to socioeconomic factors in golf, Paskus said the NCAA's research suggests athletes in tennis are more affluent than golfers but significantly less likely to gamble on sports. In fact, just 3.4% of Division I men's tennis players gamble on sports at least once per month, down from 9.9% in the 2004 survey.

Whether the reason is cultural or socioeconomic, it concerns the NCAA that golf's trend lines are going the opposite direction. Because even though you won't typically find college golf odds in a Las Vegas sports book, and it's not a likely place to find a point-shaving scandal, the NCAA is also concerned about gambling as a function of student welfare. More than 8% of male athletes who gambled in the previous 12 months reported a single-day loss of $300 or more.

"I don't see why golf should be higher than tennis or a couple other sports you could put in there," Kentucky coach Brian Craig said. "You can't hold somebody's hand 24 hours a day, but the kids 100 percent know that you can't do that. All you can do is trust their integrity that they're going to do the right thing and protect the program and themselves, because otherwise you're putting yourself and your teammates at risk. It's not worth it."

Wagering behaviors among men's golf student-athletes

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Although the numbers specific to golf are staggering, the NCAA is also concerned about general attitudes toward gambling that emerged from the survey. Among athletes who wagered on sports in the past year, 57% of males and 41% of females believe it's acceptable as long as they bet on sports other than the one they play. Also, 59% of male and 49% of females in that category said they believe people can consistently make a lot of money betting on sports.

"Student athletes are a little different on sports wagering; they seem to gravitate to it a little bit because they feel they know sports and they have some sort of inside knowledge that can give them an advantage," Paskus said. "They have interest in sports and enjoy betting on sports, so that's an interesting number. ... They tend to overestimate the abilities of themselves and others around to be able to win at sports wagering."

Other notable findings from the survey:

Sports betting among females was much lower than males at just 5% across all divisions.

Among Division I men's basketball and football players, 4.6% said they had been contacted by outside sources to share information about the team, up from 1.2% in 2004. That increase is attributed mostly to the explosion in social media. However, only 0.8% claimed to have provided information to those sources, a slight decrease from previous surveys.

The NCAA's targeted efforts on education in men's basketball appear to be paying off. Only 0.8% of players in Division I reported betting on their own team, down from 2.0% in 2008. A miniscule 0.3% said they knew of a teammate who was a student bookie, down from 1.8% in 2004.

Only 19.9% of men and 17.7% of women considered participation in a fantasy league with an entry fee and prize money to be gambling. (It is against NCAA rules.)

The number of athletes playing cards for money has decreased steadily since 2004, with just 6% in this survey saying they had done so in the past year.

Of all male athletes who admitted to gambling within the past year, 6.7% had placed a bet on high school or youth sports.

Though the NCAA understands it can't curb all sports betting, one thing the survey made clear is that it needs to do a better job of educating athletes. Just 72% of males and 76% of females in Division I said they had been explained sports betting rules in 2012 compared to 77% of males and 83% of females four years earlier.

"Those things are increasingly of concern," Strothkamp said, "and from our educational point of view we need to start hammering home some of those things that are becoming a little bit more normative."